Monrovia, Indiana (2018)
Dir. Frederick Wiseman
This is my first experience with a Frederick Wiseman
documentary, but, from what I understand, it’s something of an outlier in his
long filmography (more than fifty films since his 1967 directorial debut!).
Wiseman, I am told, is a beloved chronicler of American institutions, a creator
of dispassionate, observational documentaries which capture the natural rhythms
of the world, a stalwart acolyte of the cinéma verité tradition of
documentarians. But MONROVIA, INDIANA doesn’t quite fit that
description. I mean, it's not exactly a big-budget blockbuster either; it's certainly dispassionate and observational --even clinical-- in the way one might expect from Wiseman. But I'm not sure it's entirely objective, for reasons I'll get into in a bit. Of course, just a quick look at Wiseman’s wikipedia page reveals
that he never claimed any such thing about himself in the first place. In his own words, "All
aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore
manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you have to ... try to
make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your sense of what was going on.
... My view is that these films are biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed
but fair. I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any
objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account
of the experience I've had in making the movie"
That's an important thing to have in mind, because making a documentary about
Monrovia, Indiana, smack dab in the middle of the Trump era, is an inherently
unobjective thing to do. In an era of bitter cultural divide, there is very
little chance of any viewer --at least, any viewer likely to watch a Frederick
Wiseman documentary-- failing to recognize that this zero-stop-light
semi-rural* farming community --97% white, comfortably (though not
monolithically) politically conservative, earnestly religious-- reads
unmistakably as a pristine exemplar of the "real America" that American
Conservatives, and especially Trump, so eagerly romanticize. Which makes the
film inherently political: if the town comes across well, it's a de facto
propaganda piece for an idealized, regressive conservative vision of society.
If they come across poorly, it's a stinging rebuke to that idealized "real
America" (courtesy of a Boston-born, Yale-educated East-coast ivory tower
elitist with a shelf full of film awards from institutions one in this town has
ever heard of). The possibility that this will simply be a modest document of
modern rural living is simply not on the table; we’ve all been drafted into the
propaganda arm of the culture war whether we asked to be or not, and, just as
“all aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice, and are therefor
manipulative,” so too our viewing choices, and our reactions to them, inherently
speak to our beliefs and aspirations. There’s no dodging the issue; if we’re
watching this, we’re going to have to ask ourselves if the people of Monrovia,
Indiana are with us or against us.
It is, then, a little confusing when they come across as simply boring. The AV Club review blasted Wiseman for his "maddeningly evasive" and "apolitical" take on the apparently red-hot “political” issue of what daily life is like in Monrovia, Indiana. And it’s true! The film simply refuses to come out and explain what the moral is. Wiseman doesn't interview his subjects, he simply observes them, and, as the AV Club critic so dubiously points out, "people rarely launch into political diatribes unless prompted," so other than a few shots of right-wing slogans on T-shirts at a local festival, national politics go entirely unmentioned. Instead, people just putter about with their lives; we get to observe several excruciatingly banal local town council meetings, watch the locals get their hair cut, get married, stock supermarket shelves, assemble pizzas in the sole downtown restaurant, window shop at the gun store, chit-chat over coffee about their health. Nothing incendiary is said; no dark secrets are uncovered.
You could certainly read the film’s careful documentation of harmless banality as a repudiation of Liberal paranoia that these presumable Trump voters are violent, unhinged racists (one IMDB comment fumes, “this movie's timid Ford-Foundation-approved portrayal of arch-conservative gun-hoarding Indianans as good-hearted and simple soybean folk was not exactly what 2018 demands.”). And yet, it's hardly a glorification of this way of life, either (tellingly, another comment sniffs that it’s [un]flattering” to the townsfolk). In fact, though there is no narration and no explicit theme, I feel quite confident that the film does have an opinion about life in Monrovia, Indiana, and not a particularly positive one. But that opinion has little --though not nothing-- to do with the politics of its inhabitants; instead, it's a very subtle, low-key, and not entirely unsympathetic dismay at the all-pervasive stagnation of spirit the camera records. The portrait that emerges is not of a town which clings to the past in the nostalgic, reactionary way that we associate with the politicization of "Real America," but rather one which is mired in its past because the present offers so little of any meaning.
Near the start of the film, we encounter a schoolteacher expounding at great length about Monrovia's legacy of basketball greatness, personified by former Monrovia resident, basketball hall-of-famer and Indiana University Basketball coach Branch McCracken. McCracken is, seemingly, everywhere in Monrovia; the high school gym bears his name, among numerous other markers, including his grave.** But McCracken died in 1970; his days of glory as a player were in the 1920s! Little wonder that the students listening to this lecture are openly bored by it, obviously much more concerned about how they're coming off for the camera (one young lady keeps adorably adjusting her shirt, obviously unsure how much shoulder she wants to show off for the movie).
This is one of the first little slice-of-life vinegettes we see in the movie, but it will not be the last time we observe an audience which is palpably disinterested in what they're observing. Throughout the course of the film, we'll witness a series of speakers talk at an audience which is politely half-listening; preachers, friends, council members, customers, mattress salesmen. These speakers are, more often than not, spectacularly dull, but there’s more to it than that; there’s a profound, palpable detachment on the part of the listeners which makes one suspect that so little registers with them that it’s hardly worth the bother of saying anything interesting in the first place. In one case, the product testimonial of a CBD oil vendor at a local fair takes a shocking turn when her claims about its use as an insomnia cure includes an anecdote about her own experience waking up to discover her husband's corpse in bed with her! If the startlingly grim and personal nature of this story (not to mention the strangeness of bringing it up as an aside during a pitch for CBD oil at a county fair) seems unusual to her potential customers, we see no evidence of it; her small audience treats this admission with the same barely-attentive glazed look they affected for her claims as to its efficaciousness for combating fatigue. They're not really very interested, but in the absence of anything else to engage their interest, it's not really worth the effort it's going to take to leave the conversation, as opposed to simply tune it out. And this feeling of hazy disengagement permeates nearly every encounter in the film.
This, I think, is at the heart of what Wiseman found in Monrovia: not the angry people at Trump rallies, but the bored ones who mostly don't bother to vote at all. People for whom life has become an anesthetizing waking dream that they barely even notice. People without direction or purpose or motivation, who drift through life mindlessly consuming without particularly enjoying or even noticing the things they consume, emptily reenacting the rituals of the past simply because there's so little in the present worth investing in that doing so is the path of least resistance.
Tim Brayton saw a town that "isn't so much ‘dying’ as ‘dead’, and it simply hasn't figured it out yet," but that's not exactly what I see; instead, I see a place which has become entirely automated, a machine which mindlessly cycles through its various pre-programmed functions simply because no one has bothered to shut it off. It's not a "dying" town in the traditional sense (in fact, there is a contingent of the city council which is monomaniacally concerned about the town growing too much) but, at least as far as we see in the film, it is so empty of purpose that the metaphor of a zombie certainly does suggest itself.
But even a zombie seems more animated than some of the human interactions we observe here. Zombies, after all, want something, even if it’s on a level removed from sentient thought. Not so here, as far as we can see. This is a document of a consumer culture where even consumption has become a tiresome habitude. In fact, we watch again and again as people seem utterly overwhelmed by the very idea of having to choose a consumer product. One of the more comical scenes in the movie involves a high school fundraiser that takes the surreal form of a mattress sale in the Branch McCracken gymnasium. The camera watches the strange spectacle of fully-clothed adults drifting from one mattress to the next, reclining, and trying fruitlessly to decide how they feel. Completely bewildered by the prospect of having to make a decision, they gratefully turn to a real shark of a mattress salesman (far and away the most dynamic speaker in the whole film) for expert guidance he is only too happy to offer. Perhaps the most fundamental tenet of consumerism holds that it provides the consumer with choice, which empowers them to specifically tailor their consumption towards individual fulfillment. That assumes, though, that people have a clear enough idea of themselves to innately understand what they want; in the absence of that, the whole system is reduced to absurdity. Meaningful consumerism, it turns out, requires a surprisingly thorough understanding of self, which, paradoxically, this particular consumer society seems utterly unable to support. This is, ultimately, what the movie is documenting: a culture so denuded of its own identity --individually and collectively-- that it has ceased to make sense, even on the basest level.
Elsewhere, we see shoppers in a supermarket tentatively examine the endless array of mass-produced consumables as a affectless voices inanely chimes over the PA system; positively somnambulistic crowds at an auction for enormous, hundred-thousand-dollar agricultural vehicles; dazed window-shoppers at the county fair. By far the most engaged shoppers are at the local gun store, where one customer prattles on effusively for minutes on end about the technical bona fides of various models to a disinterested proprietor. Yet even here, the specter of noncommittal consumerism is never far away, as other, silent customers wander the gun racks, picking up one gun after another, briefly aiming it, trying to imagine what it would be like to own it, and mechanically putting it back down. Most do not buy.
Crucially, none of the things being consumed are visibly associated with Monrovia, which despite its agricultural economy does not seem to produce much for its own consumption. We see pigs and cows being corralled and loaded onto trucks, but wherever they go from there doesn’t appear to be in Monrovia. Is that meat in the supermarket from the local beef cows? If so, there’s no indication of it; it arrives at the meat department in the same clear plastic packaging you’d see at a grocer’s in downtown Manhattan, from which it is removed, run through a tenderizing machine, and then individually repackaged. We see titanic volumes of corn being produced, and, from a brief visit to the waste disposal plant, we see that it had made its way, more or less unaltered, into people’s feces (proving that even a 90-year-old auteur documentarian is not above a subtle poop joke). But where it goes in-between is a mystery. We see no farmer’s markets, no subsistence farmers happily feasting on their own produce. Even the vendors at the county fair appear to be overwhelmingly hawking T-shirts and bumper stickers almost certainly produced thousands of miles away. Agriculture may be the heart of the local economy, but it is produced on an industrial scale, and shipped off somewhere else to become the processed final product which makes its way back to supermarket shelves. Despite the omnipresent crop fields, there’s little sense that people feel connected to the land and the produce around them. Their whole world is one little stop along the assembly line, and they might as well be producing automotive widgets or cardboard boxes, for all they’re emotionally invested in the process.
It’s such a dipshit thing to say, but there’s no getting around saying it: this is a portrait of suffocating, soul-deadening Marxian alienation. People doing work, --working hard, even—but so completely disassociated from the meaning and value of that work that it’s not just separated from any emotional significance, but actively stifling. Despite the agricultural milieu, this is a thoroughly mechanized world, as far removed from the natural world as any Rust Belt manufacturing plant. To wit: the camera watches with interest the harvesting of a hay field, which involves not just one but several huge, sophisticated machines; one to cut the plants, another to collect them, a third to bale them, a fourth to pick up the bales, a fifth to assemble them into giant pallets and lift them onto a waiting truck. At no point do human hands enter the process; one cannot help but imagine the machine’s driver himself will be entirely superfluous within the lifetime of these farms. A significant portion of another man’s workday appears to be to manipulating a lever which releases oceans of dried corn kernels from a unthinkably vast holding tank into another holding tank, and then a huge truck.*** Despite the setting, these men more closely resembles industrial workers in a factory than the straw-hatted family farmer of the American popular imagination.
And things look no better in other industries. The silent, endlessly repetitive process of packaging dozens of portions of meat for the supermarket, and the robotic, eerily rapid work of assembling pizzas in the kitchen of the sole downtown restaurant have an unsettling quality of watching humans turned into machines.**** But it’s not just the jobs that are mechanized and dehumanizing: witness an endless ceremony at the local Masonic lodge, all of it structured around obviously unfamiliar pre-scripted texts that the members struggle through with mechanical incomprehension. Virtually everyone in in attendance looks upwards of 40; it is the very opposite of a portrait of an organization with any vitality, or even emotional investment. Which is odd, because what they’re engaged in is a ceremony to honor a man for his 50th year as a Masonic brother; one would have no choice to assume that they do care, that at the very least the familiarity of this man who has certainly been present throughout their entire association with this organization, would spark some affection. Perhaps they’re simply too disconnected to feel anything at all in this context, period, but I suspect –and I think the Wiseman feels the same way—that the rigid, prescriptive formality of the ceremony is the stumbling block here, discouraging more authentic human interaction making it impossible to engage emotionally.
That same sense of rigid ceremonial structure stifling real human engagement is also visible in several visits to different church functions. Even two major life events –a wedding and a funeral— display a striking reserve on the part of the participants, as the presiding religious figure delivers an impersonal oration on broad, abstract topics which seem far removed from the real human beings ostensibly being celebrated by the occasion. Unlike the Masonic ceremony, the church events are in contemporary, plainspoken vernacular, but the end result is the same: an event that makes the participants into passive observers, politely listening to a lecture rather than meaningfully participating in the event they’re ostensibly celebrating. The funeral, in particular, offers a strange and heartbreaking spectacle; a minister delivering a eulogy which focuses intensely on the joys of the afterlife (especially the “mansions” he says Jesus promises his followers), peppered, somewhat awkwardly, with a comparably tiny handful of anecdotes about the deceased which he’s obviously repeating second-hand. It has the uncomfortable feeling of a form letter, a familiar spiel he’s repeated so many times that it has a practiced, performative quality, with the dead woman’s name simply inserted in the appropriate blanks. Meanwhile, the camera occasionally pans to the bereaved family, sitting in the front row, fiercely struggling to suppress their emotion while yet another smarmy salesperson makes a pitch to them about the luxury goods awaiting believers upon death. It’s a rare moment where the raw humanity that is surely present in this population bubbles to the surface, only to be forcibly tamped down in the name of propriety. Not only do these ceremonies seem emotionally inadequate, they suggest a culture which actively discourages serious emotional engagement with life, asks adherents to repress messy emotions for the sake of convenience and decorum.
Ironically, the place we see people most engaged is in a lengthy
series of town council meetings. Here, people are at least feisty and active in
a way we seldom see anywhere else, even if they’re mostly talking past each
other rather than wholly engaging. But the low-simmering anger which is very
perceptible at the table is so wholly inappropriate given the absurd
mundanities which are actually up for discussion (a road linking two existing
roads; the frequency with which residential fire hydrants are flushed) that the
specter of displaced malaise is omnipresent here, too. The argument is never
really about the banal topic at hand; instead, it’s dominated by a fundamental disagreement
about the future of the town. A new housing development called “Homestead” has triggered
a real backlash among some members of the council, who clearly see an influx of
newcomers as an existential threat to the local character. It is, at the heart, a debate not about roads and hydrants but about "who we are," and whether the fundamental nature of Monrovia is capable of any kind of growth or change. None of this is said aloud, but everyone present seems to understand the basic conflict. One pro-Homestead
council member makes a point of emphasizing that the “newcomers” are, at least
in some cases, actually native Monrovians who have “come back”, but the anti-Homesteaders
aren’t having it, subtly suggesting the newcomers are potentially untrustworthy
and criminal. The council is divided on this matter; several members delicately
point out that young people are leaving town for better prospects elsewhere (indeed,
there appears to be a missing generation, a gap between the youngsters we see
in school and the older crowd who seem to make up the bulk of the townsfolk),
that without population growth, the town can’t hope to grow economically. But
the naysayers are intractable, and absolutely single-minded. Monrovia is what it is, and to change it is to destroy it.
These council meetings***** are lengthy, and feel, to some degree, like the heart of the film (certainly, they’re the only vignette which contains any kind of conflict, and are consequently dramatically compelling in a way that simple footage of local events are not), the center of Wiseman’s thesis about what is broken in Monrovia (if that is, indeed, the thesis). If much of the film documents the many ways that the townsfolk seem alienated and detached from life and work, this may be the reason why: It's easy for us to see that the locals' resistance to change has trapped them in a prescriptive, stifling purgatory, but then again, nobody seems able to imagine a more appealing alternative. A sense of local identity in continuity with history may not be an especially nourishing for the soul, but at least it’s something. What can the more forward-looking council members offer to replace it? A slight tick upwards in local economic growth? Cheap housing developments with phony fire hydrants? The past half-century is not lacking in examples of small towns who sold out their unique local character in exchange for pre-assembled strip malls and ubiquitous Wal-Marts. That is unequivocally not an adequate solution to Monrovia’s existential crisis. And without a tempting path forward, what is there to do but hold onto the past, with its fading but still tangible meaning, as hard as you can?
Which brings me to something I haven’t mentioned yet: this is somewhat personal for me. I was born a half-hour drive from Monrovia. My parents currently live about an hour’s drive to the South. I have relatives all over the state. Though I haven't lived in the state since childhood, it’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that I’ve driven through Monrovia. Certainly, I’ve spent plenty of time in small Indiana towns exactly like it.
I’ve never for a single moment been tempted to go back. So much for objectivity! Just driving through the countryside between the Indianapolis airport and my parents’ house fills me with a desperate, heartsick loathing. A visceral horror wells up within me as I pass through, a crushing sense of the inescapable emptiness silently screaming out at me from all around. You can feel that slow, inexorable hollowing out of the human soul that Wiseman documents so carefully here. That sense of communities slowly fading and fraying and, most painfully, utterly bereft of any hope that the future holds anything better. It’s that hopelessness that hangs so heavy, I think; that sense of something slippery and vital that was lost somewhere along the way, leaving behind nothing to replace it except hollow nostalgia and a corrosive bitterness at... at what? The forces that snuffed out that sense of optimism and community (if it ever really existed, though I, for one, at least feel strongly that it did) are so abstract and pervasive and indefinable that you’re even denied a clear antagonist, refused a satisfying narrative to explain how things ended up this way. And so you end up in a simmering fury over fire hydrants, or an all-consuming rage at the whole of modernity. Or, unable to sustain that kind of helpless anger, you simply burn out and drift through life as a blank, apathetic automation, mechanically going through the motions of a prescriptive way of life that has ceased to have any emotional utility but still retains enough cultural hegemony to limit other options.
I needn’t belabor the point by explicitly tying that cycle of rage and apathy to national politics. And I don’t mean to imply that mindless consumerism, mechanical dehumanization, and decaying social connections are exclusively a problem of small-town America. Far from it – we feel that way in the big city, too. Monrovia's soul-sickness is an expression of America's; we’re all feeling the lack of something integral to the sustenance of the spirit, all lashing about desperately for a sense of connection and meaning, all tied into a dehumanizing consumerist system which promises satisfaction that it is intrinsically incapable of delivering. But at least in the booming modern metropolis --the implied "Phony America" where I've spent most of my life--, that loss was compensated with a new vision of ourselves as global beings, living in an infinitely complex world full of new ways to invent ourselves and new projects to give us purpose. False hope, perhaps, but hope nonetheless. The endlessly malleable cosmopolitan landscape, constantly in a state of destruction and renewal, proved better able to re-imagine itself as the world changed, while Monrovia gripped the past ever tighter. And in doing so, it simply got left behind, its institutions and its entire reason for being gradually sapped of relevance. It didn’t die in the practical sense –it’s still functional, and nothing suggests that it won’t remain sustainable into the foreseeable future—but maybe its soul did. And we have reached, I think, something of a breaking point; these two worlds cannot continue to diverge and still expect to productively co-exist. Either we invent an inviting, nourishing future for everyone, or we’re going to end up a broken, crippled society, and that hopelessness and alienation is going to turn into violence.
This is not an academic point; the
misery of Monrovia, Indiana is our misery too. We either salve it, or accept a
grim future where every review of a simple, slice-of-life documentary ends up as
pretentious and pedantic as this one. A chilling thought, indeed. But if that happens, at least Wiseman will hopefully be around to make a few more documentaries about it. MONROVIA, INDIANA may not presume objectivity, but rarely if ever has two+ hours of mild, closely observed daily minutia affected me so profoundly.
* Which is, I note, only a half-hour outside metropolitan Indianapolis, the 17th-largest city by population in the US, larger Seattle, DC, Boston, and Detroit.
** Well, technically the grave is in nearby Hall, Indiana, but it's where the movie ends, so we'll count it.
*** And it’s not just the harvesting process which is governed by artificial forces; the seeds, the water, the fertilizer, the very genes in the plants themselves are owned and provided by giant corporations somewhere far away. That’s not in the movie, but it’s a part of what’s going on here that can’t be overlooked. The entire process has been set up to remove nature as far from the equation as physically possible.
**** And I’ll remind you: I’m not just some sheltered prep school kid shocked and repulsed by the idea of an honest day's work. I’ve worked both these jobs myself! Literally, I’ve worked at both a grocery store and in the kitchen of a pizza place! But what struck me about this footage is the brusque, unnatural focus of the work; my memories of those jobs are full of big personalities, irreverent conversation, the natural camaraderie born from working together at a job that sucks. In Monrovia, they don’t even listen to music. From what the movie shows us, they’re working in total silence outside of a few curt bits of necessary communication. It’s so antithetical to my experience that I’m tempted to wonder if Wiseman is cheating a little here to prove his point; if this really is “a fair account of the experience I’ve had,” then the residents of Monrovia may literally be Pod People.
***** Meetings are, apparently, something of a Wiseman staple, which makes sense as a good technique to capture the local spirit, if you’re not going to directly interview people directly.
